Aruba, July 3, 2013 - The federal government awarded 22.25 percent of its contracting dollars to small businesses last year, short of its 23 percent goal.

This is definitely not Small Business Week -- the SBA waited for the slow Fourth of July week to release its annual piece of bad news: once again, the federal government has failed to meet its goal of awarding 23 percent of its contracts to small businesses.

Federal agencies got a little closer -- 22.25 percent of all federal contracting dollars went to small businesses in fiscal 2012, according to the Small Business Administration. That's up from 21.65 percent in 2011, so the SBA touted this as "real progress."

It's been seven years since the federal government hit its 23 percent small business contracting goal, and no one believed that number was accurateback then. That's because the government's data showed that many contracts that were counted as small business contracts actually went to large businesses. Plus, some types of contracts, such as work performed overseas, are excluded from this report under the theory that it's unrealistic to expect that small businesses could perform such work.

The SBA and the Office of Management and Budget have worked with federal agencies in recent years to clean up their procurement data, so let's give them the benefit of the doubt and consider 22.25 percent as an accurate number. That's still not small businesses' real share of federal contracting, however, because of the various exclusions from the data.

Plus, it's still a miss. The 23 percent goal is not supposed to just be an abstract goal; it was established by Congress. The government is required by law to hit it.

Its failure, year after year, to do so is "simply unacceptable," said Rep. Sam Graves, the Missouri Republican who chairs the House Small Business Committee.